Guide

Welcome Area, New Computer Museum v. 1.5 (You are Here!)

Introduction

The goal of the “Virtual Edition” of the New Computer Museum is twofold. It demonstrates the vision of what the “real” New Computer Museum has the potential to become, and it also stands on its own as a valuable educational experience. This is particularly true because of the extensive material included in this Guide (see right side margin). Finally, it is also an exploration of how the new wave of 3D tools can be used in the context of education and museums.

The core of the New Computer Museum is a 3D interface. The video below shows a quick walk-through of the application. Notice that the posters and almost all of the objects link to content and interactive activities. The “title poster” in each exhibit links to the relevant page on this site, while other posters and objects link elsewhere. There is a high overlap between content in the application and and on this site, but there is not 100% correspondence.

Instructions

The application was created with the Unity3D game engine, so it requires a computer up to running modern games. An example of a machine that it will run on is an Intel® Quad Core™ i7-4700MQTurbo and a 3.4 GHz 4th gen NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M plus 16 GB RAM.

Downloadable Application (Last update, December 22, 2015)
The application runs on Windows 7/8, and you can download it from Google Drive. Click the image or file below, then click “Download.” It is a self-extracting Zip file (.exe). You may receive warnings that you are downloading a “suspicious” file. Do not worry, there are no viruses.

New Computer Museum v.1.5 (NEWCM-Dec.exe, 64 mb, Google Drive)

Once you download the file and unzip it, you will see a folder called NEWCM-Dec that has a NNEWCM-Dec.exe file and a data folder. Click on the NEWCM-Dec.exe file to run it. Again, you may need to allow your virus software to run it or click “more info.” and “okay” in Windows Defender. After you are running the application, you will see these instructions for navigating and interacting with the content.

Galleries

Here are a series of screen shots of the museum. Click the images to open corresponding pages in the New Computer Museum Guide on this site.

Earliest Computers Exhibit, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

Pioneers Posters & Videos Exhibit, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

Big Iron Exhibit, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

Supercomputing Clubhouse, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

DEC & Friends Exhibit, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

Microcomputer Gallery, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

Public Lab & Library, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

Learning & Computing Gallery, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

Game Arcade, New Computer Museum, v. 1.5

Immersive Experiences Gallery, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

Gift Shop, New Computer Museum v. 1.5